The Museum System presents the exhibition Stones have always slept beneath the open sky (Le Pietre dormono all’aperto), displaying works by the artist Carlotta Valente in dialogue with the prestigious 18th-century woodwork of the La Specola Museum and selected meteorite specimens from its litho-mineralogical collections.
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Le Pietre dormono all’aperto (Stones have always slept beneath the open sky)
Temporary photography exhibition
September 19, 2026 – January 3, 2027
La Specola Museum, first floor
The exhibition is included in the museum admission ticket and can be visited during regular opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM.
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Opening: Friday, September 18, at 5:30 PM | Free admission
The exhibition marks the conclusion of the homonymous project through which the Museum System successfully participated in—and was selected among the winners of—the Strategia Fotografia 2025 call, funded by the Ministry of Culture and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the MIC. The initiative funded a photographic commission focused on the collections of the Museum System.
Several of the works on display—including silver gelatin prints, daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, platinum/palladium prints, and other techniques—will be acquired for the museum's permanent public collection.
Fostering an intersection between art and science, this project presents an unprecedented dialogue between geological time (imperceptible in its shifts) and photographic time, explored through the transformation processes of light-sensitive materials.
Through an extensive process of collaboration and shared dialogue, the artist selected several meteorite specimens as subjects for her work. Billions of years old, these meteorites evoke the passage of cosmic and geological time. They are displayed alongside other mineralogical artifacts and materials, such as pyrite and halite crystals, 19th-century bronze crystallographic models, modern structural models, and the linear
pinhole sundial preserved at La Specola.